Usually ThinkGeek is pretty cool about having the latest tech, but some things just aren't right—Like the internet urinal.
I've been getting E-Mails from the blood bank recently, they have a shortage of A- blood (my type) and have been asking me to come back in and donate. Since I try to donate regularly I was feeling a little bit guilty, so when my coworker JM came and asked if I wanted to go donate blood with him, I quickly agreed. The good news is my blood pressure is fine (128/80), but the nurse poked my right arm wrong or something, and she said I will get an ugly bruise from it. She moved to the other arm and had another nurse do the poking, and everything came out all right (hehe) after that. I just pulled the pressure bandages off (I had a matching pair—one on each arm) and I really have a lump on my right arm where the needle stuck me.
On a side note, I was thinking suspiciously (I have a native suspicion of everything) that the E-Mail may just be written to get more people to come in and give blood. It said that they had a shortage of A- blood, and that several operations were scheduled this week where they would need A-. So, is it a consipiracy, or an honest need?
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About has been around for a long time, but I haven't ever posted a link to it. And while you're there, check out Angry Bed Positions. Does anyone else sense a recurring theme here?
Today I've gotten almost 90 spam comments posted by mthmarketing.com just today. Because of this, I've altered my comment policy (again). You now must register and log in to post a comment. Sorry for the trouble, but bastards like mthmarketing can't be trusted to be nice about their business practices and we all have to pay for it.
For those of you that also want to block them, here's how you do it in Apache's httpd.conf:
<Directory />
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from mthmarketing.com
Deny from 216.190
</Directory>
I meant to post about this last week, but forgot. My random pick was Kim, who I erringly cheered for, thinking she's a graduate student, she ought to be pretty good. She turned out to be a lazy, skanky hobiscuit and I'm out five bucks.
Yes, it's the day of the Green. But for me, today's not going to be different from any other day—I listen to Irish music no matter what day it is. Today's treats? Saw Doctors! I'm really upset that they're touring in this area when I'm going to be on my honeymoon in theirs (ssh! don't tell Lorien!).
Also on the menu are De Dannan, Planxty, The Bothy Band, The Waterboys, and others.
Apple Computers is finally developing a two-button mouse.
Apple enthusiasts have longed for an Apple-branded two-button mouse for over a decade
This cracks me up so much—they don't just want a two-button mouse, they want an Apple-branded one... Haha.
I had an interesting problem today: I had three text files containing about 20,000 email addresses I needed to sort and remove duplicates from. Behold the power of the UN*X shell:
cat file1 file2 file3 | sort | nodup > done
The resulting file, done now contains my sorted and duplicate-free list. sort comes standard, but nodup is my own program to remove duplicates. Here is the code:
#include <iostream>
#include <string>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
std::string a = "";
std::string b = "";
while(std::getline(std::cin, b)) {
if(b != a) {
std::cout << b << std::endl;
a = b;
b.erase();
}
}
return 0;
}
Compile it with the following command:
g++ -o nodup nodup.c -lstdc++
Then copy it to /usr/local/bin or somewhere.
You can use it with pipes like my example above, or just by itself like this:
nodup < file > done
And people wonder why I love Linux...
It took me longer to write this post than it did to finish that job.
Apparently The Pogues got together for a Reunion Tour last year. This is the first I've heard of it, and while I would have considered going to see them, I wouldn't have driven too far out of my way. I listened to them a lot during my high school years, and actually saw Shane MacGowan and the Popes back around 2000. To be completely honest, I'm surprised that guy is still alive—he looked like a zombie on stage five years ago. And I mean living dead. The roadies were lighting cigarettes and putting them in his fingers for him while he was on stage. At one point, he threw down the microphone stand, and a roadie came out and picked it back up for him (he was swaying pretty bad without it to hold on to). I think their best album was Waiting For Herb. Most Pogues fans would disagree, but they're retarded punks that think Shane is cool. Shane is a little bit funny, and a lotta big sad.
Today I had the problem of extracting encrypted user information from our online registration database in a bulk manner. I wrote a C++ program that connected to MySQL locally and queried for all the relevant records. I then had to load each one into a special class, decrypt it, dump it out in a tab-delimited format, and move to the next one. It took a little over 13 minutes to run. It extracted 19.242 records, way more than I expected to see. I figure that's about 24 records per second. It ate up around 94% CPU time, but only a small sliver of memory (I'm that good). 
Someone's gonna have an unhappy day tomorrow when they have to import them, but not me. Hehe.
I'm having some weird issues with my ISP at home—I can get a DHCP lease on an IP address, but I can't ping their gateway and can't get out to the Internet. I had the same problem last week, but it coincided with our webserver going down, so I didn't have time to investigate it, and when I got home, it had been fixed already. I'm quite sure it's not my problem, now.
Well, you might notice a change around here. I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. The upgrade process was extremely simple (unlike last time)—but like Linus says,
The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it.
About a week ago I was looking at my tape backup calendar in our server room and noticed something strange about my wedding date. The calendar is a normal one, and we mark what tapes get used on what days (we have about 30 daily, weekly, and monthly backup tapes that get rotated). The calendar not only has the days and months marked, but what day of the year each day is, and how many days are left in the year.
Anyway, the strange thing I noticed was that May 5th (or 05/05/05) is the 125th day of the year. 5 x 5 x 5 = 125. Spooky.
I had a problem. I needed a utility to keep watch over 13 different servers and 23 different services running on them. I needed something that would monitor them on a regular basis (user-configurable would be nice), but it had to have built-in notification when something goes down, too. I went digging around the 'net and found Nagios, which far exceeded my expectations. Nagios has everything. It was not simple to configure, but well worth the time to get it running. The documentation is great, and is certainly enough to get you going. And best of all, it's free. Thanks, Nagios guys, for making the coolest network, service, and system monitor ever.
Today (well technically yesterday) is my birthday, and Lorien and I went out to The Beachhouse (on Coeur d'Alene Lake Drive) for some Huckleberry Barbecue ribs. They are tast-ey! After that, we went out to see The Pacifier with Vin Diesel. It was funny, but like the reviews said, it was a cookie-cutter movie—everything you expected to be there was there. It was still entertaining, though. Lorien got me these cool T-shirts, one has a no smoking sign on it with the caption "There are cooler ways to die", the other says "I used to have superpowers, until my therapist took them away". I think she got them at Hot Topic. She also got me some of those Toasted Coconut Cashews from Costco—yes, you can still get them!